PCGH Technical Q&A: Far Cry 2

Dominic Guay about the engine of Far Cry 2: "Well, Dunia was built from the ground up. It was developed during the last 3 years in our R&D effort for Far Cry 2. We had a few major goals in mind as we built the technology. First, we wanted to get rid of the concept of 'levels'. 'Levels' have been used since before the Pac Man days to manage progression and content and are, from a technical standpoint, a very safe way of managing things. However, FC2 is a truly open world game and we couldn't do with such a limitation anymore. A change of scale like that one changes a lot of thing in a technology.

Also, we wanted to have a very dynamic game environment. We worked hard on physics simulation systems and enabling a lot of destructibility and interactivity. This also includes an arbitrarily destructible and physically simulated vegetation system codenamed RealTree. Also, we wanted to make sure our graphic technologies permitted a very high quality recreation of a realistic Africa with a real-time 24 hours day-night cycle.

Finally, another big focus from the beginning was the online. We wanted to have excellent online technology: not just quality net code but also things like matchmaking services and map editing."